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I- Have networks become
our post modern management’s necessary evil?
In 1995, under the direction of Henri Egéa, a group of consultants
began to work on modernity, post-modernity
and other topics related to chaos and complexity. This fascinating
work – based on Edgar Morin’s research and publications – was
carried out at the very moment when our professional and personal
lives were transformed by the formidable explosion of Internet usage and consequently,
of the worldwide deployment of e-mail communications beyond
the corporate Intranet. It took two years for Tim Berners Lee’s
developments on the html language to stir passion in the United
Kingdom.
It took another year before the wave crossed the channel
and hit conservative France but still, the change occurred very
quickly and we could feel that something big was going on before
our very eyes. As part of that
group of consultants, my personal research was entitled ‘Visionary
Marketing’. In my eponymous brochure (http://visionarymarketing.com)
I described the evolution of human organisations based on Joël
de Rosnay’s Macroscope.
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| Figure
1: 3 stages
of the evolution of human organisations in de Rosnay’s macroscope
(1976) and Gourvennec’s Visionary
Marketing (1995) |
To me, this brief analysis of the world around
us wasn’t revolutionary at all. Many a sociologist, thinker, philosopher had already come to the same conclusion.
Yet, one day I was suddenly summoned to pay our Marcom director
a visit and God knows he did find this diagram revolutionary.
When I came into his office, he shook the brochure before my eyes
and got into a state: “why is it that you are wreaking havoc within
this organisation? Are you calling for people to rebel against
the hierarchy?” The document in question had nothing to do with
the generation of social unrest of course, be it in that organisation
or any other organisation or even Society at large. It seemed
to me that I was making it plain that working in informal networks
was now obvious to all but reading it probably came as
a shock to the man who was talking to me. I even wonder now, with
hindsight, if he did not find the reading more appalling than
the thing in itself. Is conscience harder to face than reality?
In fact, it did not take me long before I could demonstrate my
man that I did not mean wrong at all: All our engineers, all our
salespeople, managers, technical people were indeed working in,
with and through informal networks. Each time they embarked on
a project, they evaluated their colleagues on the basis of a win-win
relationship and they did choose to work with whoever they pleased
and how. All that was only natural, and the hierarchy had nothing
to do with it. No matter what the old organisation chart was saying,
it had no impact at all on anything real.
This episode took place in 1995. Since then,
I had drawn my own conclusions about this. I thought I was much
better off keeping all my comments about complexity to
myself. This is why I decided to create a private Internet website,
build a worldwide network made of thousands of readers and
go on working unabated on my favourite subjects in a more subtle
fashion. I then let sleeping dogs lie and all was well until I
received a phone call from somebody I knew in another (very) large
organisation. This time, his request was both very tale-telling
and very weird. He wasn’t calling to tell me off for trying to
wreak havoc within the organisation. In fact it was just the other
way round, i.e. he wanted me to help him foster the creation of
internal networks under the surveillance of this organisation’s
management.
His idea was, in a manner
of speaking, to order people around and ask them to build their
informal networks, not because they needed it or wanted it, but
because some high-ranking manager somewhere out there decided
it was a cool thing to do. So much for spontaneity I should say. However paved with good intentions, this attempt at
creating ‘obligatory spontaneous’ informal networks triggered
a few thoughts and I thought I had to write something about it.
Why were informal networks
suddenly so fascinating? Were all these sociological factors,
so many writers had described in the early 1990’s now taken for
granted? Didn’t people (which people?) believe that informal networks
were some sort of universal mechanism which was meant to solve
problems that hierarchical organisations failed to tackle? Was
it not a sign that certain CXO’s could no longer handle the situation
and thought that their power status was at risk? It could indeed
mean that those who had failed to fight informal networks were
trying to ‘manage’ them in order to better control them. This
would also indicate (if only we could verify this assumption)
that our 1995 Marcom Director’s reaction was the result of the
growing uneasiness of middle managers who have to impose a vision
in front of employees who claim more freedom of speech and mainly
more freedom to act as they see fit because they own the knowledge
and know-how which bestows more power on them than middle managers
thought in the first place. Here are some of the questions that
I wished to address in this article, and even answer if I can.
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